Charles Durning, who overcame poverty, battlefield trauma and nagging self-doubt to become an acclaimed character actor, whether on stage as Big Daddy in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" or in film as the lonely widower smitten with a cross-dressing Dustin Hoffman in "Tootsie," died Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.

Charles Durning may not have been a household name, but with his pugnacious features and imposing bulk he was a familiar presence in American movies, television and theater, even if often overshadowed by the headliners.

Alongside Paul Newman and Robert Redford's con men, Mr. Durning was a crooked cop in the 1973 movie "The Sting"; starring with Nick Nolte, he was a dedicated assistant football coach in "North Dallas Forty" (1979); in the shadow of Robert De Niro, he was a hypocritical power broker in "True Confessions" (1981).

If his ordinary-guy looks deprived him of leading-man roles, they did not leave him typecast. He could play gruff and combative or gentle and funny. In the comedy "Tootsie" (1982) he was a little of each, playing Jessica Lange's unsuspecting father, who falls for a television actor masquerading as a woman.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Durning's two Oscar nominations were for supporting roles, as a slippery governor in the Burt Reynolds-Dolly Parton musical "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" (1982) and as a lustful Nazi colonel in the 1983 remake of "To Be or Not to Be," starring Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft.

Born into poverty

Charles Edward Durning was born into poverty on Feb. 28, 1923, in Highland Falls, N.Y., a Hudson River village. His father, James, an Irish immigrant, had been sickened by mustard gas and lost a leg in World War I. He died when Charles was 16. Charles was the ninth of 10 children, and five of his sisters died of smallpox or scarlet fever in childhood, three of them within two weeks.

Never a good student, young Charles dropped out of school and fled to Pennsylvania, deciding that his mother, Louise, a laundress at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, would fare better with one less mouth to feed. He worked as a farmhand and did other menial jobs before moving to Buffalo, where again he took odd jobs. One, opportunely, was as an usher in a burlesque house.

One night, a frequently drunk comedian failed to show up, and Mr. Durning, who had memorized the comic's jokes, persuaded the manager to let him go on. He "got laughs," he later recalled, and was "hooked" on show business. He made his stage debut in Buffalo.

Then came World War II, and he enlisted in the Army. His combat experiences were harrowing. He was in the first wave of troops to land on Omaha Beach on D-Day and his unit's lone survivor of a machine-gun ambush. In Belgium, he was stabbed in hand-to-hand combat with a German soldier, whom he bludgeoned to death with a rock. Fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, he and the rest of his company were captured and forced to march through a pine forest at Malmedy, the scene of an infamous massacre in which the Germans opened fire on almost 90 prisoners. Mr. Durning was among the few to escape.

By the war's end he had been awarded a Silver Star for valor and three Purple Hearts, having suffered gunshot and shrapnel wounds as well. He spent months in hospitals and was treated for psychological trauma.

Big break in '62

After the war, his big break came in 1962, when Joseph Papp, founder of the Public Theater and the New York Shakespeare Festival, invited him to audition. It was the start of a long association with Papp, who cast him in 35 plays.

Mr. Durning's first marriage, to Carole Doughty, ended in divorce; he was separated from his second wife, Mary Ann Amelio. Besides his daughter Michele, he is survived by another daughter, Jeanine Durning, and a son, Douglas.